Kirk Torrance’s Flintlock Musket

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Kirk Torrance’s (Outrageous Fortune) powerful new play is brought to the stage by theatre director Rachel House and some of Aotearoa’s leading performers.

This is Aotearoa, early 1800s, on a brutal and barren wasteland a few heartbeats before the plague of the Musket Wars. Set designer John Verryt, lighting designer Jeremy Fern and composers Tama Waipara and Sean Lynch have collectively crafted an atmosphere worthy of this foreboding story.

The landscape has a hostile beauty where the people, like primal spirits, bend to its whim. Their chief, Aoraki (Maaka Pohatu), dominates their lives like the ever demanding earth. An outsider has arrived – a Scotsman (Jason Whyte) – taken in as ‘moki’, Aoraki’s pet. Escaping his own world in search of a new one, his alliance with the chief’s slave, Hine (Nancy Brunning), is about to change the tribe’s destiny with devastating consequences.

This epic story and its haunting imagery merge our cultures and history into a stunning fusion of theatre and movement to create a uniquely New Zealand theatrical event that guarantees to etch a lasting impact on audiences.